Short-Term Profits Are Bad for Your Brain

Zocalo Public Square is a not-for-profit Ideas Exchange that blends live events and humanities journalism. A neuroscientist explains the human penchant for instant gratification Market booms and busts, like the one we are seeing now in China, are not new, as history tells us. Holland’s tulip mania in the 1630s, the South Sea Bubble a century later, and the financial turmoil that gripped the nascent United States in the are topped in their drama only by the freewheeling flapper years that ended in the crash of ’29 and the Great Depression. So why do we find learning from history so difficult? As a neuroscientist interested in the behavior of capital markets, I believe insights into the persistent cycles of boom and bust are to be found in how the brain…